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Defense battle now pits resources against ranks

Each new sunrise drains more of the financial lifeblood of the Defense Department. | Reuters

But Punaro and Ryan both said they worried about Congress having enough “information” to take the correct action on those issues. Lawmakers need to be shown just how much the Pentagon could save by reforming its personnel policies, Punaro said — potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. Administration and overhead are other places to find savings, he argued.

The Defense Logistics Agency, for example, wastes a fortune with “excess inventory,” Punaro said. When viewed as a defense contractor — although it is part of the Defense Department — it’s bigger than any of the private-sector vendors, with $53 billion in sales and revenue last year, as compared with Lockheed Martin’s roughly $29 billion from the Pentagon. But Lockheed is a marvel of efficiency by comparison, Punaro said, recalling a time when DLA boasted about how quickly it was acquiring suits to protect troops from nuclear, biological and chemical hazards. Problem was, DLA bought 700,000 left-handed gloves and 300,000 right-handed gloves, he remembered.

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Both men agreed that the shrinking pool of money means that the personnel and hardware halves of the defense establishment would come into conflict — if they haven’t already.

“It’s something that’s been going on for the past three years, in my opinion,” Ryan said. “There have been people talking about that for a while now. What the Military Officers Association, what we’ve supported, is the Joint Chiefs in reducing the size of the forces because you do have to have balance when [the] budget comes down. There’s no use having people if they aren’t trained, equipped, supplied, so MOAA has been consistent in saying there has to be balance in the force.”

Punaro said he hoped Congress and the Pentagon could act before the dispute between people and hardware reached the point at which there were no good options.

“My great fear was that this was going to become a Hobson’s choice — that we were going to have, if we didn’t get out in front of these problems, and this was before sequester, that military leaders would be caught between basically having to pick between a highly ready force, operations and maintenance, and/or a significant curtailment at modernization and research,” he said. “Well, we are there now.”